Conservation principles 1

contents index, introduction, threats and limitations

In this article you'll discover the reasons
for conservation and what benefits it may bring. You will also notice that
humans with their many rights and wishes, and their administrative organisations,
complicate matters enormously. It is important to learn the rules for successful
conservation, from saving a species to saving a habitat. You will also
appreciate that the conservation of nature is very worthwhile and satisfying
to do.

this long article has been divided in three: part1
(this page),
part2, part3
as shown by their colours

Doing something for the environment is not only
very necessary but also immensely satisfying, because you know that it
is not easy, and that it is for someone else, perhaps your own children.
Conservation lives only in the mind.

The situation in various countries illustrates
their differences and difficulties. Afghanistan, America, Australia, The
Netherlands, New Zealand.

for further study

sitemap: our site
map gives you immediate access to all articles on this site. (11p)biodiversity: what is
biodiversity? How to understand biodiversity and what is not biodiversity.
(32p)resource management:
all conservation begins by understanding resource management first. (28p)marine conservation:
the sea is so different from the land that it requires special understanding.
(34p)marine degradation: whatever
we do wrong on the land, threatens the sea. (30p)soil:
our most important renewable resource we are losing fastest. What can we
do? (large)disappearing beaches:
we are losing our beaches but few know why, as we do the wrong things.
(53p)science, technology
and human nature: if you think we can save ourselves, think again.
(35p)global threats to people
and environment: a summary of the threats to ourselves and others.
Ouch! (20p)IUCN Protected Areas recommendations
made during the Fifth World Parks Congress (Sep 2003). Covers all aspects
of terrestrial and marine proteted areas for further study. Often naive
and impractical. (50-60pages, printer-friendly)

Note! for best printed results, set your page up with
a left margin of 1.5cm (0.6") and right margin of 1.0cm (0.4")The whole article covers about 0.25MB (31 pages), including
text, drawings and photographs.-- home -- conservation
index --
Rev:20011011,20011026,20021130,20040421,20070725,

Introduction

This article builds further on the two preceding ones, resource
management and biodiversity, and is followed
up by marine conservation. Gems of knowledge are
revealed in each, so please read it all. In this article, we'll investigate
what people do to mitigate (soften) the side effects of their actions.
The main recipient of these side effects is nature, but humans affect their
own quality of life too. So conservation has become to mean the preservation
of nature.

conservation: (L: com-=with; servare=
to keep) preservation, especially of the natural environment. Keeping from
harm or damage, especially for later use. Maintaining a quantity. The management,
protection, and wise use of natural resources, the things that help support
life.

conservation is unnatural

Conservation
is rooted in the belief that something can be done to prevent the loss
of an endeared entity. When we saw native forests disappearing to shipbuilding
and firewood, we began to protect them, goes the story. However, the truth
follows a slightly different path. Forests were saved because people discovered
coal, which was much more efficient to use. Instead of building ships from
timber, steel proved to be a better choice. Instead of burning firewood
for locomotives, coal proved more efficient. Thus coal and steel saved
the remnants of native forests. Likewise it was fossil oil that saved the
whales. If no economic replacement can be found, people will use the resource
to the last little bit. Conservation in its early days, often happened
by accident. However, today, people are using knowledge, foresight, labour
and technology for proactive conservation.

Nevertheless,
it seems that the three underlying causes, population growth, economic
growth and material needs ('standard of living') are too holy
to be stemmed, or even discussed. So it happens that all our conservation
efforts are directed at fixing problems, rather than preventing them. Worse
still, the concept of sustainable development requires us to increase
economic activity while also conserving the environment, two opposing goals.
Conservationists now try to improve our 'quality of life', the need for
a clean environment, such as clean air and water, uncluttered living areas,
and unspoiled scenic lands. Only very recently has the concept of biodiversity
entered the conservationist's vocabulary. It requires healthy ecosystems,
not just for the benefit of people but also for those other millions of
species. Conservation can be grouped into the following classes:

soil conservation: soil has become threatened by human cultivation
and climate change, resulting in loss of fertility, erosion and desertification.
See our separate section on soil.

water conservation: water is needed for food and industry, but in
many nations a severe shortage is looming as humans use over 50% of fresh
water that never reaches the sea. See also our separate section
soil/fertility/water.

atmosphere conservation: Clean air is needed by all organisms on
Earth. The atmosphere regulates the Earth's temperature and protects it
from harmful radiation. Global warming and ozone depletion threaten all
organisms, including humans. A separate section will be devoted to this
subject.

natural habitat conservation: wildlife needs natural habitat, one
of the subjects in this article.

wildlife conservation: preventing extinctions, maintaining biodiversity.
When severely endangered, conservation focuses on the conservation of a
species, which is also dealt with in this article.

mineral conservation: the mining of minerals rests almost exclusively
in the hands of mining companies. Their business is to supply an ever hungrier
market. Conservation of minerals can be done only at the consumer's end,
by reducing the need, reusing by-products and recycling
wastes (the three Rs). A separate section will be devoted to this later.

energy conservation: energy is the main driving force behind industry
and indeed our civilisation. Our entire standard of living depends on energy
to the extent, that people in developed countries use the equivalent of
50 human slaves each, or more. Fossil fuel is going to run out and alternatives
have to be found, as well as energy conserved. In 2003 a separate section
will be devoted to the problems of energy.

urban conservation: in recent times, many cities have grown so rapidly
that they have become unlivable due to overcrowding, traffic jams, inadequate
public transportation systems, air and water pollution, noise, and lack
of recreational parks. People flee the cities to live in suburbs, causing
urban areas to sprawl, which exacerbates the transport-related problems.
Urban conservation aims to make cities more livable, while halting urban
sprawl. This aspect of conservation will be treated on this web site at
a much later date.

marine conservation: the marine environment has its own rules, and
needs to be considered separately. See the article conservation/marine.

The history of conservation began with land conservation by terracing cropland
(1000BC, including vineyards and olive groves), water conservation by water
harvesting and irrigation (100AD), natural parks for wildlife and scenery
(1870), hunting and fishing laws (1900). The depression of the 1930s saw
active planting of forests on degraded lands, and building dams and levees
to control flooding. World War II closed fishing for a while, allowing
fish stocks to recover (1939-1945). The 1970s highlighted the dangers of
agrichemicals like DDT. The 1980s became aware of the disappearing rainforests,
the 1990s of climate change and greenhouse gases, and today conservation
is slowly taking in all aspects of unnatural human influence, rendering
the subject rather large and confusing.

This article will look at conservation, in order of generality, as saving:

an endangered species: the most acute form of conservation and the
most popularised, and also the most expensive is to attempt to save a species
on its own. Saving is difficult. Marine mammals conservation will be treated
in a separate article.

a unique spot: without being able to say why, people are able to
recognise unique spots. Because of their uniqueness alone, these deserve
to be saved. Saving is easy if people agree.

a migration relay: some places are special spots for nature, not
for humans. It is important to recognise such spots and to save them, because
many species rely on them for their survival.

a sample habitat: by saving a habitat, a large number of interrelating
species is saved as well. It requires a certain amount of knowledge to
do so.

genetic diversity: saving genetic diversity should be simple, but
to do so effectively, has some pitfalls. This has been discussed extensively
in the article on biodiversity.

In this article, we'll look at the threats to ourselves and nature, our
motivations for doing something about them, and how it is done. In the
process, we'll discover some basic principles, benefits and limitations,
and a number of solutions. The purpose of this article is not to give recipes,
but to foster an understanding of all related issues, so that you can make
your own conservation plan. It will become clear that conservation is not
easy to do right, and many mistakes have indeed been made. Please note
that some gems of understanding have been presented in all the other articles
belonging to the section on conservation, of which this document is but
one article.

Ever since humans populated the Earth, and constructed civilisations,
threats have haunted them. So what are these threats?

Threats to the environment

Most of the side effects of human activity have remained unnoticed because
they either happen very slowly, or somewhere else. People have become very
good at avoiding unpleasant side effects, like living outside cities to
escape air pollution, processing wastes and sewage far away from where
people live, and so on. Those with power have often found ways to avoid
the unpleasantness of their actions, which is much easier than confronting
the issues. As a result, conservation action often comes when the situation
has become unsalvageable.

In the Summary of threats to humans and the
environment, an attempt has been made to list all the human-made effects
and their causes, amounting to a damning report card with frightening consequences.
As mentioned above, people do not wish to remove the real causes of their
problems, even when continuing their ways makes no sense. For instance,
since 1970 the economy more than doubled, but personal discretionary spending
remained the same. People today are hardly better off than 30 years ago.
We have to work harder in order to be able to afford the same. In the same
period, the pressure on the environment and on humans themselves, grew
threefold! Clearly, a tradeoff between zero percent better living and 300%
higher risk, is not a sensible one.

One would like to be able to classify the threats to the environment
by the seriousness of their nature, but this cannot be done, because threats
differ from place to place. However, we have placed them here in order
of seriousness globally, while also indicating whether old or new. Old
threats are those nature has learnt to deal with, and from which it can
recover more easily.

habitat
loss, disturbance & fragmentation (new): habitat destruction
is by far the most serious of all. By taking the house and livelihood away
from species, they have no place to live, so they die. Once habitats are
changed, the soil and water cycle changes, and everything else with it.
It is unlikely that habitats can ever be restored. It would take thousands
of years.

exotic species introduction (new): exotic species like rats, mice,
stoats, cats, goats, pigs, deer and other pests, have displaced native
species and preyed upon them. It has changed the balance achieved through
thousands of years of co-habitation thoroughly, driving many species to
extinction and changing the environment forever.

soil erosion (old): where humans have unsuccessfully farmed, cropped
or grazed, not only have habitats been lost, but also the fertility of
the land. Erosion sets in and nature attempts to redress the damage by
establishing weeds and successions of species to stabilise the land, and
to revert it to a new balance. It will take a hundred years for a modest
recovery, but a thousand years or more for full recovery. If grazing by
goats and deer continues, erosion will ultimately bare the basal rocks,
resulting in absolute infertility and several thousands of years to recover.

exploitation (old): predation is natural and necessary to stabilise
populations.

balanced expoitation (old): after thousands of years of living together,
an ecosystem has developed predation to benefit the community and its functioning.
Predation does not wipe out selected species. Recovery is quick.

unbalanced overexploitation (new): hunting and fishing wipe out
selected species, thereby affecting the balance of communities, and with
it their functioning. Recovery is slow.

competition for food (old): where species are threatened by competition
for food, fewer are able to survive. As long as some food remains available,
recovery is fast. However, humans pride themselves in their effectiveness
of taking all.

chemical
pollution (new): humans have made a frightening arsenal of new chemicals,
unknown to nature. Many of these are very potent biocides, developed for
this purpose, and such that nature has no defense against them, which renders
them effective for a long time (forever?). Such poisons can accumulate
in organisms all the way up the food pyramid. By means of high level energy,
humans are able to make chemical compounds that won't break down by natural
means. These are valuable to us for their longevity (paints, metals, plastics),
but should not be released into the environment, since nature has no way
of breaking them down.

nutrient discharge (old): where people congregate, sewage concentrates
from the food they eat. The valuable nutrients in sewage should have been
returned to the land, but they are wasted to the sea instead. It causes
problems. To make matters worse, because nutrients do not return to where
they originated, farmers use artificial fertilisers to make up for this
loss, which causes additional problems. Fortunately, nature adapts to a
certain degree, but in many places we have gone over their limits.

global climate change (old): the planet has survived excursions
in global temperature, although accompanied with loss of species and changes
in ecosystems. Life on the planet has evolved to stabilise temperature
fluctuations, but within narrow limits. Small changes in temperature can
be adapted to, but large changes may result in catastrophy. Local climate
change due to the disruption of the water cycle, is bound to have more
serious and lasting effects.

nuclear wastes (new): nuclear wastes have the nature of being dangerous
and long-lasting. But the world, its atmosphere and space have a certain
amount of natural radiation, which has not been damaging, even been beneficial
to life. Storing nuclear wastes in a responsible way is a problem. Nature
has no means of cleaning it up naturally. Only time cures it (thousands
of years).

debris pollution (new): debris like tree leaves, branches and trunks
have always 'littered' nature, but with harmless or even useful effects.
However, pollution by manmade, lasting products, has an influence on some
species. Humans don't like the look of their own wastes, and in the process,
clean up natural debris as well.

pathogen discharge (old/new): pathogens (diseases) are life forms,
living on other organisms. They have always been around and nature knows
how to handle them. However, a new disease, arriving from a different continent,
may quickly wipe out one or more species that have no immunity to it.

All the above mentioned threats have, of course, been created by human
activity. The table below attempts to present an overview of human activities
and their threats to our resources.

This table gives an overview
of the damage caused by what we do. Horizontally our main resources; vertically
our actions. Conservation must be concerned with reducing all threats on
all our resources. Note that the activity of fishing has been left out,
because it has little or no effect on the other resources. Marine conservation
is an entirely separate issue.

With so many threats identified, what are our options and tools to do
something about them?

Conservation toolsSince
our threats and problems appear to come from our actions, it stands to
reason that controlling those, would bring solution. However, the path
to a problem consists of several steps, which can all be addressed to solve
or to alleviate our problems. The diagram here shows that problems arise
from a need, which leads to action. To look at problems alone, would bring
costly fixes that do not last. They look like providing ambulances at the
bottom of the cliff, rather than a fence at the top. The best solution
is decreasing human population, then abating our needs, followed by controlling
our actions, and finally by fixing problems.

The conservation toolkit consists essentially of controlling the when,
where, how and how much, as follows:

people: controlling the number of people is difficult on a worldwide
scale, but can be achieved locally in many ways. By limiting the
growth of an activity, its impact can be reduced. Advance bookings, required
competence, fees, required participation (work) can all help to stem the
number of people.

time considerations (when): an activity often does not need to continue,
and time can be allocated for nature to recover. Fishing areas can be closed
temporarily. Pressure from tourism may disappear during winter. Carless
days. Seasonal closures.

designating areas (where): activities which are conflicting, can
be separated by designating special areas for each. Living outside the
noise and pollution of manufacturing. Closed areas (reserves). Areas with
restricted activity (parks).

quantities (how much): by controlling quantities, especially in
renewable resources, nature is given time to replenish. In industry substantial
gains in efficiency can be made, but usually only once.

reduce: reduce the amounts: eat less meat; do not overeat. Use less
for producing the same (energy and minerals). Less packaging.

reuse: find a use for what has been discarded during production.
Other industries may have a use for your discards. It may provide additional
income. Reusing packaging like containers, for something else. Multiple
use: design the product and packaging for multiple use.

recycle: reuse the materials of products that have come to the end
of their lives. Recycle rubbish. A natural world consists of cycles, which
are closed almost completely. Nature recycles optimally, and so does a
sustainable society. Recycling glass, aluminium, paper, garden wastes.

quality: some goods need high quality, some need to be long-lasting,
others need to degrade quickly after having been discarded. Quality applies
both to our actions, their outcomes and resource use.

quality: avoiding obsolescence. Making products to last for future
uses. Making products field-upgradable, modular, compatible, repairable.
Using standards. Reducing spare parts inventories. Reducing the number
of similar products.

methods (how): we can do things in more friendly and less damaging
or energy inefficient ways. Often ignorance causes harmful actions. Many
inventive solutions exist.

disposal: every product comes to the end of its use, and needs to
be disposed of. Plan disposal when the product is made. Reuse, recycle.

reducing risk: safety for workers, against mechanical harm, breathing
or contact with materials. Applying the cautionary principle when in doubt.
Keeping wide margins. Spreading risk. Risk is often in conflict with efficiency
of scale. Smaller units.

prevention (environmental hygiene): prevention of threats is the
best medicine. Like hygiene for health, it gives the best results for the
least cost. Preventing habitat destruction is very important and effective,
and so is preventing the introduction of exotic species (biosecurity).
Education is the right way.

sharing: sharing products to get better use, and reduce costs. Renting
rather than buying. It forces manufacturers to make lasting products which
are cheap to use. Sharing makes better use of resources.

motivation: incentives and disincentives. Subsidies and taxes. Punishment.
Compliance. Enforcement. Law (local, national and international).
People must be protected from harm and incompatible activities, and this
can be extended to resource use. Law is suitable for 100/100 solutions:
full compliance at full cost. See economic tools
and incentives below.

education: education to make people aware; to enlist support; to
change a mind-set. Education is cheap and long-lasting. It works particularly
well for conservation, which often requires 80/20 solutions, where most
of the result is achieved with the least cost. It relies on responsibilities
in return for freedom. It also works in unforeseen circumstances.

captive breeding: as a last resort, technology and inventiveness
can be used to increase numbers, either by assistance in the wild (nest
boxes, pseudo parents), or by capture and reintroduction into areas without
threat (island reserves), or by captive breeding followed by reintroduction
into the wild. If reintroduction is not possible, the threatened species
may need to be kept in zoos (plants in gardens).

business approach: if possible, turn conservation into an income
earner. Eco-tourism, business franchises and entry fees can all help to
defray the cost of conservation. See economic
tools and incentives below.

Note that combinations of several of the above-mentioned improvements are
usually made, like a temporarily closed area, higher quality service combined
with reduced risk, and education programmes.

Please take some time now to apply these conservation tools to some
of the threats and harmful activities listed in the table above. Imagine
the effectiveness of your solutions, and how society would react. Also
consider the cost of implementation and enforcement, and how long it would
take to show results. Make a realistic implementation plan, followed by
a management plan.

It is often thought that by doing nothing (no-take policy), a reserved
area will improve by itself over time. However, when the causes of species
decline (threats) are not taken away, that won't happen. Conservation is
about taking threats away. It makes no sense to lock species up in a prison
(reserve) together with their threats. Thus the removal of exotic predator
species from island reserves is of utmost importance.

If people were to immediately experience their own wrongdoings, they
would be more inclined to corrective action. How then can they be made
to bear the cost of their actions?

Economic tools and incentivesThe United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Global Biodiversity
Assessment (GBA) approaches conservation from a freemarket perspective,
which dominated the worldview at the time (1992-1995). The idea is that
the market price mechanism should be able to drive the conservation effort,
which would need no further interference. In the box the suggestions made
by UNEP GBA. Please note that none of the options has been tested or proved
in practice.

Lowering forest production
costs: Costs can be reduced by directly involving the local populations
in the protection and management of natural ecosystems (as guards, tour
guides, collectors of non-timber forest products and scientific samples).

Using water fees as ecosystem
conservation incentives: Local communities derive little benefit from
maintaining the watersheds, since the principal beneficiaries are located
downstream. Water and hydropower pricing that includes a watershed protection
charge levied upon farmers, urban and industrial users, provides a way
of compensating local communities.

Internalising tourism
benefits: The portion of ecotourism benefits that flow to the local
population can be expanded by engaging local people as guards and tour
guides, and by issuing ecotourism franchises to communities and allocating
a portion of the ensuing revenues to the development of local employment
opportunities.

Reforestation incentives:
Land owners who keep their land in forests, can receive a tax credit or
rate rebate. Since this approach is especially beneficial to large, wealthy
owners, a system can be devised whereby small-holders can earn tax credits
that they can sell to wealthy taxpayers having taxes to offset.

Differential land use
taxes: Categories for classifying land uses can range from environmentally
most beneficial (e..g. natural forest) to environmentally most destructive
(e.g. industrial site). To internalise the environmental cost of habitat
conversion, a charge is imposed on the landowners when land use is changed
from a higher to a lower class.

Environmental performance
bonds: Environmental bonds shift responsibility for controlling deforestation,
monitoring and enforcement, to individual producers and consumers who are
charged in advance for the potential damage. These bonds can ensure that
adequate measures are taken to minimise environmental damage and that funds
are available for restoration of environments if compliance is poor.

Forest compacts: Compacts
are undertaken by one country with the support of another, to engage in
policy reforms, conservation and investment programmes, that achieve specified
targets of sustainable forest management or preservation in exchange for
financial and technology resources. For example, Carbon Offset Agreements
have been established between a power utility company in a developed country
and a developing country, to finance a shift to more sustainable logging
practices, in exchange for tax credit by the utility for the carbon stored
or retained on sites by the funded forestry activity.

Transferable Development
Rights (TDRs) and Conservation Easements: These policy instruments
enable a country or private land owner to sell the 'right' to convert a
natural habitat for a price that fully covers the opportunity cost.

(Source: UNEP Global Biodiversity
Assessment, 1995)

One of the causes of environmental threats is ignorance. What do we
know, and how can we spread that knowledge?

Limits to ecological
knowledgeScience has become great by applying the scientific
method, honesty and intensive scrutiny. Those branches of science able
to conduct controlled experiments, flourished (physics, chemistry, microbiology,
medicine, etc.). However, ecology, the knowledge of living communities,
and how they function, is hampered by a number of problems:

large systems: ecosystems are large, covering many hundreds of kilometres.
Causes may originate many hundreds of kilometres upwind or upcurrent. Plankton
systems move around, and up and down.

large timescales: some changes happen in a matter of minutes or
hours (bacteria), whereas others happen in thousands of years (soil formation,
succession and microclimate), or millions of years (evolution, adaptation).

natural variation: natural variation can hide trends and make observations
and the collecting of data, comparing and analysing, difficult or impossible
to do. Variations occur in time, from season to season and year to year,
and spatially from creek to hill crest, north to south, east to west, bottom
to top, this side to that, and so on. What is natural and what is not?

complexity: within an ecosystem, food is produced on several levels
(bacteria, fungi, plants, animals), and species depend on one another as
a source of food. As a consequence they profoundly affect one another's
lives. But ecological relationships go further, providing attachment, shelter,
pollination, protection, pest control and so on. Some species have many
larval stages and sources of food (sea).

no base studies: one would like to go back in time, to study how
the situation was before problems became visible, in order to make comparisons.
The reality is that baseline studies have not been done, which is understandable
because some problems could not be predicted - then again, many could.
We have no record of all species on Earth, thus we will never know which
or how many have become extinct already (calculated at 12%).

non-linear systems: nature does not always behave like an elastic
band. Pull it, and it extends. Pull it further and it extends further,
while offering more resistance. Pull it further still, and the band snaps
- that is non-linear behaviour. It is unpredictable and does not follow
known arithmetic or logic. Non-linear is also the growth of an individual,
a population, distribution, reaction to external factors like temperature,
and much more. Ecosystems accumulate certain qualities (humus, nutrients,
energy), but also poisons (DDT). Irreversible change is possible, and we
don't know when that will happen.

feedback: natural systems achieve stability by feedback mechanisms
which evolved over time, by the interaction of hundreds of species. A feedback
control system feeds some of its output (effects) back to its inputs (causes)
so that it reduces them to produce a stable output. Time lags between causes
and effects complicate matters further.

not suitable for laboratory: ecosystems do not lend themselves for
controlled experiments in the laboratory. They are too large, and transporting
them would change them radically. Studies cannot be duplicated for verification
elsewhere, because the ecosystems will be different. Changes that are so
easy to see, are often very hard to quantify.

field work required: ecosystems can only be studied where they are.
It involves inconvenience and difficulty in conducting meaningful experiments.
Isolating a single tree ten times, is a major job.

modelling: where systems are too large to handle, scientists resort
to mathematical models in order to create a virtual reality, which can
then be compared with the real situation. However, ecological processes
are rather complicated by the large numbers of interactions, non-linear
mathematics and many unknown factors.

surprises: phenomena that run counter to intuition turn out to be
sharply different than was conceived. Behaviours are profoundly unexpected,
and when action produces a result opposite to that intended - in short,
when perceived reality departs quantitatively from expectation. (C S Holling,
1970s)

With knowledge of the consequences of our actions in place, we can now
develop civilisation further, but on a sustainable basis, or can we?

Sustainable
developmentThe notion of sustainable development comes from
the inequality between the developed and the developing world. The developed
world became prosperous from the use of technology and excessive amounts
of fossil fuel. The developing world hopes to get there using the same
formula. It would thus be unfair to apply the same rules to both. For instance,
whereas the developed world could sustain savings in fuel by pressing for
fuel efficiency, this would be of unaffordable cost to a developing world.

The urge for development also comes from a fictional mandate we have given
ourselves, that of not withholding prosperity from present and future generations.
Thus the world and its resources must be exploited to their maximum in
order not to deny this right to present and unborn generations. However,
what we use today, won't be there tomorrow. The concept of sustainable
development is riddled with contradictions.